T-Mobile 2Q 2013 Earnings: The Un-Carrier is Un-Stoppable?

T-Mobile today reported their earnings for the calendar and fiscal second quarter of 2013. Within their earnings, there was a lot of good news for the company that was looking to turn itself around. First, they reported that the company had a total of 44 million customers, an increase of 10 million over the previous quarter, with 8.9 million customers coming from the completion of the MetroPCS acquisition and 1.1 million coming as new subscribers. T-Mobile also saw their churn rates in both pre-paid and post-paid customers go down to 5.4% and 1.6% respectively. This growth in new customers is the biggest the company has ever seen in a single quarter in as much as four years, which indicates that the new CEO’s strategy to change the company is working.

This resulted in an EBITDA decrease of $1.1 billion or 16% compared to the same period last year. This was achieved on increased revenues of $6.228 billion or an EBITDA margin of 24%. Primarily due to the fact that T-Mobile had introduced so many new promotions, significantly higher gross additions and higher upgrade volumes. Programs like JUMP will increase upgrade volumes further, but more importantly, T-Mobile’s base will likely continue to increase further, giving them a more solid subscriber base, enabling them to generate more profit and continue to upgrade their networks.

T-Mobile expects for the full year to report, on a combined basis with MetroPCS, an adjusted EBITDA in the range of $5.2 billion to $5.4 billion, which indicates that T-Mobile expects continued growth. Currently, T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network covers 228 million people nationwide and their LTE network, which was only launched fairly recently is already at covering over 157 million people in 116 metropolitan areas and is on target to cover 200 million people in 200 metropolitan areas.

It remains to be seen whether or not T-Mobile can overtake Sprint any time soon, especially with the Softbank acquisition of Sprint, which will likely pump billions into the company to make it a competitive carrier, much in a way that T-Mobile did. If anything, we hope that T-Mobile’s success will server as an example for Sprint and that they will do the same as T-Mobile and draw even more customers away from the two elephants in the room, AT&T and Verizion, both with over 100 million customers each.